Company Alignment through Task-Centric Collaboration
A front-end hub of collaboration essentials keeps employees at every level on the same page
July 28, 2022
One of the most universal struggles for any business is figuring out how to keep all employees — from the CEO to the interns — on the same page. Many are turning to digital transformation as a way to tackle this issue, but as the apps start to pile up so do new communication problems. In this article we’ll help diagnose the pain points in your company’s processes and show you how a front-end hub of collaboration essentials can have an immediate impact on your operations.
Difficulty Tracking Progress on Large Projects
Company-wide initiatives require an elevated level of coordination, but traditional project management techniques are plagued with inefficiencies. Time is wasted on sync meetings that break focus and eat away at productivity, or on generating and reading reports that produce excess busywork.
Without this coordination, it’s a challenge to make long-term plans and set realistic goals because you’re too reliant on other people as a source of critical information. You run the risk of basing important decisions on opinions rather than facts, and there’s no functional way to know how your directions are actually being implemented.
Swit Solution
Our unique All Tasks filter gives you a complete overview of all projects in your workspaces. This provides executive-level visibility and proper context so you can make data-informed decisions with confidence. You’re also able to individually set the project view based on specific needs, such as Timeline to see overall progress or Status to know what’s in the pipeline.
Lack of Clear Instructions for Employees
When instructions are given out verbally in a meeting or included in an email, there are often information gaps as directions are misinterpreted or misplaced. Employees may write down a task to complete but forget to write the deadline, or miss an essential component buried in the chain of email replies. In this type of environment, rumors and hearsay run rampant, and miscommunications grind projects to a halt.
Swit Solution
The Swit WorkOS provides transparency both vertically and horizontally, so that every person at every level of the company is both accessible and accountable. By hosting all your collaboration essentials in one place, you’re able to track the entire lifecycle of a project from initial conversation to completed task.
Swit provides you with the ability to take a message from a chat channel and directly convert it to a task, which pulls all the relevant information along with it and ensures you’re giving clear instructions. You can also connect a project to a chat channel so that any task updates are automatically broadcast to relevant personnel.
Priorities out of Alignment
As a CEO or team leader, how can you make sure your employees are in sync when it comes to task priorities? How do you keep employees aligned to work on the most important things first rather than filling their day with low-priority work? It’s a challenge to convey the nuances of priority, such as balancing urgency with importance, or differentiating between different types of urgency, such as bug fixes vs customer review management.
Swit Solution
The tiered priority system on Swit task cards makes it clear what needs to be addressed in what order. We also provide you with the flexibility of setting custom statuses for task cards (e.g. “To Do” or “In Review”) so that you can further define the progress stages and complete urgent tasks more efficiently.
Task card checklists are another way to keep priorities aligned, because they offer the ability to designate both assignees and due dates for each item. This ensures that each team member knows what they’re responsible for addressing and when they’re expected to complete it, and also provides management with a roadmap to follow without needing to micromanage employee time.
Cross-Functional Projects Get Delayed
You may see information silos as an inevitable issue or just the cost of doing business, but they are so much more than a mere frustration — they waste valuable time and can ultimately cut into profits when projects grind to a halt. Communication breakdowns could even be causing friction between coworkers, impacting job satisfaction, polluting company culture, and leading to the loss of valuable employees.
Swit Solution
Swit’s limitless scalability is made possible by offering easy communication across every workspace you’re a member of. Cross-workspace DMs keep multi-departmental project participants aligned by closing the communication gaps that exist between different job functions. You can also share channel messages across multiple workspaces, which ensures cross-functional teams are viewing and accessing the same information at every project stage.
Our integrations support pairing email with Swit’s right panel, giving you access to drag and drop emails into a channel to share and provide a space for conversation. This bridges external and internal communications, keeping your team’s comments centralized and trackable within Swit.
Contact our team of experts to find out how company-wide implementation of Swit can streamline all your project management needs in one platform.
Natalie Litofsky, Managing Editor
